Credit card gang face jail

A gang carrying out Britain's biggest credit card fraud has been smashed by undercover detectives.

Three businessmen downloaded 8,790 credit cards from customers and passed them on to forgers to create fakes for use across Britain and the Continent.

The gang pocketed £2 million from 847 cards of passengers using the Heathrow Express rail link.

They could have made up to £20 million if all the numbers had been used. The businessmen used some of the forged cards to buy cigarettes in Belgium, spending nearly £8,000 on one day alone.

Three men pleaded guilty to the conspiracy and were facing major prison sentences at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court this afternoon.

Sunil Mahtani, 26, an IT expert, masterminded the three-and-a-half-year operation while working for Checkline Plc, a company that processed card transactions for Heathrow Express.

Roger Smart, prosecuting, told the court: "The extent of this conspiracy, both in terms of the number of credit cards compromised and the fraud spend subsequently applied to the card numbers, places this as the largest credit card fraud investigated to date by any police force in the UK."

Detectives pinpointed the Heathrow Express as the "common point of purchase" for a large number of credit and debit cards in the fraud and found that the banking data had been compromised.

Mahtani had been able to "data download" from the Heathrow computer system processing the card transactions, the court heard.

"It was Mahtani who had both the necessary information technology skills and access to the relevant data to download the credit card details

that were subsequently unlawfully used, having been transposed by others onto forged credit cards," said Mr Smart. "Once the card numbers were compromised Mahtani passed them in electronic format to his co-defendants, who applied them to cloned credit cards used in either Europe or the UK."

But the fraudsters were only able to use 10 per cent of the compromised numbers.

"Had all the card numbers that had been compromised been used to conduct fraudulent transactions the actual level loss would have been in the region of £19,734,000," he added.

"The estimate is based on a figure of £2,200 on each credit

card, which is the average amount of spend before it was stopped."

Eleven men, including Mahtani's co-defendants Shajahan Miah and Shaidul Rahim, both 26, have been arrested in England and

Belgium. Mahtani started work at Checkline in April 1998 when his uncle, Suresh Mirpuri, was managing director, and was dismissed in December 2000 after the company was taken over.

The card fraud was smashed after an undercover officer met Rahim at the Holiday Inn, Brent Cross, in August 2001 and asked him for "face cards" that he could encode and emboss.

Rahim said he would not sell just the blank cards but a whole package, including compromised numbers which he could get from "collusive" merchants who were "prepared to go kamikaze".

Mahtani, Miah and Rahim have each admitted conspiracy with persons unknown to defraud the central clearing banks and other financial institutions between 29 April 1998 and 12 September 2001.

Mahtani alone has also admitted conspiracy to defraud eight other named individuals. The three men are due to be sentenced later today.